


Mercy Lives Not in the Holly

by Asuka Kureru (Askerian)



Series: psychic wolves for every fandom yee [6]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sparks, Blood and Violence, Canonical Character Death, Even in AUs he dies, Gen, Gore, Graphic Description of Corpses, Grief/Mourning, Poor Klaus Barry, Psychic Bond, Psychic Wolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 00:05:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14988452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru
Summary: Agatha's brother had been fit. There were old scars she'd never heard about. The last time she'd seen him naked, she was four and he was seven, and she'd splashed him in the face with soapy water; he'd sulked even after Judy made her apologize, which she had thought at the time had been the height of unfairness. Now he was a man.Now he was dead.--Prequel toI've Come to Claim a Heart From TheeandThrow Thy Cloak Aside to Feed Me.





	Mercy Lives Not in the Holly

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [I’ve Come to Claim a Heart From Thee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993550) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru). 
  * Inspired by [Throw Thy Cloak Aside to Feed Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9671726) by [Asuka Kureru (Askerian)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askerian/pseuds/Asuka%20Kureru). 



> Pity maiden for your folly  
> To venture in these woods alone  
> Mercy lives not in the holly  
> No compassion from the stones
> 
> \--  
> This is a psychic wolves, no-sparks AU. Basically everything is almost like "normal" late 1800s, only there have been wolf packs living around humans and mentally bonding to specific ones since prehistoric times. You should start the series with [I've Come to Claim a Heart From Thee](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993550) (pre-Agatha/Tarvek) though, as I wrote it first and there will probably be less assumptions of familiarity with the settings to catch up on.

_There'll be time later._

Half-hearted snowflakes drifted down on the paved road. Up there the castle waited, and her wolf-ghost great-uncle, and the servants who hadn't run out of town on her mother's coattails. She wasn't going to know many of the ones who had stayed.

She didn't know many genuine townspeople at all, did she. In the end. A doll in her display case.

Judy's big rough hand patted her hand; Agatha lifted her head away from the window frame. "Lord Faustus is not a bad man," Judy said quietly, hesitating just a breath too long, making Agatha doubt. "He'll care for you. You're family."

Agatha snorted quietly, then felt bad for that. "Of course." Heterodynes always cared about their family, didn't they. Grandfather had cared for Agatha. Father and Uncle Barry had cared. It was never the problem. 

Kolya had cared, Kolya and Rerich. Even with all the awkward, painful silences between them. _Where did your sister go, did you see her? No Nanny, I did not._

There'd be time later. Time to take that distant love and bridge it, share the same memories from different points of view, understand. She'd been three months at school in Beetleburg when she figured it out; that while Agatha floundered through the prison of their mother's suffocating love -- all the things Lucrezia wanted Agatha to have only because they had been things she herself wanted -- Klaus Barry Heterodyne was to be a Duke and an army commander and a packleader of three thousand wolves and those had never been things that their mother gave the slightest damn about, and all he could see in return was Agatha squirming her way out of a tender-looking hug while he sat at their grandfather's right hand and never got better than a gruff "not bad at all" and the same rough pats Saturnus gave his wolves.

Meanwhile Agatha herself would have given anything to have their grandfather notice her as more than a generic girl-child who _probably_ liked dollies and lace and whose mysterious womanly moods had better be left to her lady mother and her nurses. At least his affection and pride in Kolya had been genuine.

Then Grandfather had died and Agatha would never get to sit by him with her long-gone grandmother's letters in hand and point out how many things they had in common. 

But it would have been a long shot anyway. 

Kolya, now...

"We're here, Agatha."

Kolya, never.

The horses danced in their bars. There was no great-uncle Faustus to greet her at the gate alongside the warden and the cook, and the town seneschal, whited out with age and bleak misery.

There was a calico wolf, enormous, ignoring the horses and Agatha's nursemaid and her driver. Just looking at Agatha. 

She turned tail and padded away without saying anything either.

\--

She had been gone all of eight months and already Agatha's old rooms felt like another planet, the dusty dregs of some other, younger child's life. Delicate pinks and early-morning blues, a gigantic mirror and a dozen smaller ones that she used to carelessly drape discarded clothing over to keep from running into her own face over and over.

The only good thing about Lucrezia was that she liked to know things, and their shared love of science had prevented her grumbling too loud when Agatha leaned more toward the mechanical than toward wet, messy biology, the tangled classification of species. But Agatha's books were all still in their trunks. The shelves were empty.

This afternoon they were going to parade her brother's coffin through town, and then stuff it away in the crypt. 

Five minutes after waking she had thrown on a dress and left her bedroom behind.

Judy would be in the kitchen at this hour, reacquainting herself with the cooks. Punch would be... she wasn't sure. Maybe checking on the horses. Not in their room under the eaves at any rate. There were no servants to be seen in the family quarters, no wolves either, not anyone.

She walked into the family hall, and there were finally living beings -- wolves and Great-Uncle Faustus. 

Breakfast was spread onto the long table but he wasn't sitting at the head of it; he sat slumped in a low wooden chair covered in animal pelts, right beside the chimney. Three wolves sat around -- a rotund monster of a yellow male, the calico queen from earlier, and another, methuselan wolf stretched out on the heartstone -- Zog, his first brother, bonded an astonishing seventy years ago. They were all staring at her the same way, Faustus and the wolves.

Silence, then, as Agatha looked at her grandfather's hermit of a brother, wolf-ghost, wolf-mad who sometimes forgot his own body for dreaming within the pack instead.

"You will be my heir, of course," was the first thing Faustus told her, before even 'hello' or 'I'm sorry for your loss.' 

Agatha's head was slow with grey grief. She was his only blood family left and he had never even tried to marry. Of course she was his heir. The recipient of the family fortune and lands, the one through which the peerage had to flow, they both knew this -- so why... 

"Do you mean," she said slowly, "you want me for a duchess régnante."

There were women who reigned in their own name out here in Europa, of course -- widows, waiting until their son reached an age to take over. There was Queen Albia, deprived of a male match amongst the Europan royalty of her time, who would have handed down the throne of England to someone of lower, unworthy rank, to a stranger to her country.

Mechanicsburg was a duchy. There were other dukes out there. Agatha had never thought...

Agatha had an older brother. It had never been her problem.

The yellow male yawned delicately, like wolves did to be conciliant -- see, we're all friends here, I could sleep beside you. His maw could have swallowed a goat kid whole. Faustus snorted, waved a gnarled hand in a way that illustrated exactly nothing. Agatha tilted her head and stared wordlessly until he remembered she wasn't inside the pack mind with him and he needed to actually use his voice.

"Isn't that obvious? I've got no patience or care for hunting down and training up a feckless husband."

Oh.

She'd been supposed to go to university, to learn. Not great for a Duke's second-born daughter, but who would marry a Heterodyne who wasn't already one of their allies anyway, did it matter if she was willful and learned? Grandfather had been slow to convince but he was dead in the crypt a bare two months before Kolya said, 'I heard you wanted this? You can, here, just have it.' She hadn't even had to figure out how to ask, how to say 'I know you're alone now (Mother just flounced off in a sulk and won't be back) but I want to leave too.'

She couldn't figure out what she thought about it, about Mechanicsburg snapping its maw on her again after she'd thought she'd escaped, dragging her back. What she felt. _If_ she felt.

"I'm unwolfed," she pointed out. "Isn't that why Mother couldn't be regent?" 

(If Lucrezia had been regent, would Kolya be alive? He hadn't died on official business. Just on a walk with his brother wolf, something he must have done five times a week even in the worst winter. But it might have changed enough.)

(Agatha would never have been allowed out of town if Lucrezia were reigning here. Agatha would have been around. Maybe she'd even have been -- while they were being crazy! -- in the woods with her brother and his wolf. Saved him singlehandedly somehow.)

Faustus' mouth tilted down; but then he stood, hands like claws on the arm rests. "You've got the blood, at least. You are pack by right of birth. Your mother... Mmph." 

"Blood is all I have, though."

What the outsiders never understood -- what Agatha herself understood only from the outside, from intense study and desperate hunger and regretful admittance -- was that _Mechanicsburg was the pack_. Human or wolf, bonded to any specific beast or not. It didn't matter. They were a collective will, a wordless understanding -- unthinking, unbreakable solidarity.

Bill Heterodyne had rejected a wolf at age fourteen. The town had rejected him right back. None of them afterwards had a word to say against Saturnus when he disinherited his son and took custody of Bill's children right out of his hands.

"You've got smarts. Your school sent me your grades. Critical thinking skills, fast to learn. That's... something."

He pushed away from the chair, made an imperious, follow-me gesture. The huge yellow male looked up, nosed at his side. 

"Are you hungry?" Faustus asked, like he'd just been reminded it was a thing some more mundane humans worried about.

"Not really."

"Then come."

Agatha wanted nothing less. She followed him anyway.

\--

There were two wooden tables side by side in the vaulted cellar and upon them there were two bodies. 

Rerich was as obviously dead as Kolya, even without sallow, waxy skin to betray him. Something in the way his fur lay -- like it had been washed of blood and left to dry in clumps and the body hadn't moved even once to separate the strands again. His jowl hung loose, jaw misaligned by gravity. So many strangely implanted teeth, and those oddly curling dewclaws that rendered them useless as opposable thumbs. Rerich had always been a splendid show of Heterodyne breeding -- a hulking beast in wine-red fur with strange pointed ears and a too-short snout, teeth coming up doubled and snowshoe paws, massive muscles under a deceptive layer of fat.

It was less shocking on him, the wounds, masked by fur and preexisting deformities.

"They'll be made up and dressed later," Faustus said, and wandered right up to the middle of them, hands joined casually behind his back. "I want you to look at them now."

The human corpse's face was.

Was. Sallow-skinned. Lividity obvious. One eyelid cracked open, eyes sunken in, glassy.

Mottling. Bruises.

"This is probably the injury that killed him," Faustus said, a finger pointed toward the bowed-inwards temple. "But that might have occured peri- or post-mortem. His hips and backbone were crushed in, so he may also have died of bleeding in his guts."

Agatha made a quiet humming noise in acknowledgement. The lower ribs looked strange, too.

Her brother had been fit. There were old scars she'd never heard about. The last time she'd seen him naked, she was four and he was seven, and she'd splashed him in the face with soapy water; he'd sulked even after Judy made her apologize, which she had thought at the time had been the height of unfairness. Now he was a man.

Now he was dead.

"Rerich probably died first, or the pack would have known."

Faustus was frowning, gazing down at the wolf. His own wolves hadn't come farther than the front door, sniffing diffidently at the floor.

He was right too, Rerich would have howled his shock and grief through the pack mind for the whole town to know. The fur made it hard to see, though...

"How?"

"Broken back. Possibly higher, toward the shoulders, and that may have stopped his lungs."

"Oh." Agatha nodded.

Agatha frowned.

"How long does it take to die from lack of air?"

Faustus looked straight at her, arched a bushy, ivory-white eyebrow. "That depends on if the victim was conscious to fight toward air at the time, and on whether there was bleeding. A swooning victim falling in icy water may last quite a bit longer than a panicking one."

"But it's... Not instant. Either way." 

If Rerich had been conscious.

She'd never touched her brother's wolf. Her mother had forbidden Kolya from bringing him inside the family quarters, around Agatha, smothered herself in perfume, and anyway Kolya was outside with him all the time once they bonded, running around the fields and getting their training in.

His fur was plush, with longer guard hairs coming through. His skull felt fine, all of one piece, but she didn't know what she was looking for. His neck -- too muscled to tell, for someone who knew nothing about bones and bodies, too...

... She'd never petted him, never been allowed, never said, hello, brother of my brother, how do you like him, are you two close, are you having fun --

"Why did you show me this," she rasped out, pulling her hand out of Rerich's ruff before she clenched it over something that was not hers to hold onto. "I knew they were dead, that was good enough."

"Was it?"

"If that was some -- some kind of _test_ , to see if I'm _strong enough to reign_ , then--"

Agatha's throat choked. Her eyes burned. It was so odd. She still wasn't feeling it, not yet. It was like being in a boat on a calm lake and feeling the water stir as some -- some unimaginable leviathan started its slow rise from the depths.

She was fine. She wasn't going to capsize. She'd never find the surface again.

"I'm done here," she told Duke Faustus Wolf-Ghost Heterodyne, and turned on her heels and left. The monstrous wolves at the door stepped aside to let her through.

\--

It had been good enough to be told they were dead, Faustus was wrong. She hadn't needed to see the corpses. She hadn't _wanted_ to see the corpses. The corpses were fake and empty, nothing but clay and old random pelts, it wasn't her brother, or her brother's brother, it wasn't them. She knew Kolya had died but this wasn't him. 

"Agatha? Agatha, where are you going, you need to eat and then we must get you dressed--"

Judy was standing in a doorway, hands kneading her apron worriedly. If they were in Beetleburg she would have hugged her, Agatha knew. But there were other servants here and there was _decorum_ and Agatha needed to have her mourning dress fitted on so she could follow the bier to the cathedral just after noon, so she could trail like a ghost through a town she'd never been allowed to know. So that some priest or other could say empty words and after sufficient ogling by the crowd they could turn right around and bring the casket back to the castle and they could all close the book on Klaus Barry Heterodyne, the heir who didn't get to rule a year. The son who never got to have good parents, the brother who never got--

"No," she said, and rushed past Judy.

There was still a servant's passage behind the tapestry of Saint Francis and his wolfbrother going down and down in an endless spiral, there were still tunnels crawling past the walls of the castle and toward the walls of the town, and she didn't know a way past the walls themselves ( _play with your dolls, girl-child, you don't need more than to stay safe inside_ ) but the gates were wide open to let in every peasant in the duchy who wished to gawk at their late little lord. She forced her way out against the flow, in slippers and a house dress, hair loose and no hat. She gave no one the time to stop her.

Nobody had told her where it had happened, but that was okay; the second she left the main road for the well-maintained woods lining the path she knew for sure she was being followed.

"Well?" she called out, pushing between bushes at random, only trying to move away from the road, the people. "Where is it? Show me!"

She felt mad, shouting orders at trees, tearing tiny, unfurling leaves off branches that wouldn't push out of her way fast enough. The woods were quiet with interrupted bird songs and nothing else but everybody knew Faustus Heterodyne was _everywhere_ in the pack mind, everybody knew the pack knew everything and the times they didn't tell was when they didn't care.

"If you don't show me the way I'll still go!" (How? No matter. She'd just keep walking. She would find it or get lost first, or it would storm, or. She'd still go.) "Come _out_ already--"

There. By that elm. 

A wolf was staring at her through the undergrowth, his gold eyes so pale they looked lit up from the inside. The rest of his body was dark, stocky. He didn't approach.

"I need to find where they died," Agatha said, forcing herself to politeness, and her voice broke oh so slightly on the last word. "I need..."

Kolya's wolf name had been the acrid scent of cannons shot across a battlefield. She'd never smelled it. She tried to approximate -- she'd smelled handguns, cordite, it should be similar. Rerich had been... For a moment she didn't even remember. Something about rabbits. Some kind of warren. She wasn't sure.

The wolf blinked slowly, then turned, disappeared in the bushes. Agatha threw herself after him. "Come back -- don't leave! Are you showing me?" She couldn't see him anymore, she couldn't -- brambles catching her dress, low branches slapping at her face, and she slipped in muddy, mushy-snow-laden grass --

Another wolf ghosted by, dark like a shadow. She called, again. Where were they going? Were they leading her to where she wanted to go? Or back home? No, no, she wasn't going home, if they tried to drag her she would pelt them with _rocks_ \--

She fell on one knee, feet slipping out from under her; it hurt. She gritted her teeth. She was alone in the woods once again. She forced herself to breathe out, to check the moss on the trees, the angle at which shafts of sunlight fell through the canopy. Not back to town. Alright. Keep going. If the wolves had led her wrong then she would just. It didn't matter if they led her wrong. She'd keep going until she fell, and once she was rested she'd stand and go again, and...

She was sitting on damp moss, sobbing with rage and not moving.

A long nose pushed under her elbow from the back, whined quietly. Past the first spasm of surprise Agatha could only grit her teeth and tighten her hold over the top of his huge blond head as he tried to push her back up, like a hug except less friendly.

She struggled back up, knees stiff, smarting. The wolf's long back reached her waist. One of his ears hung in a permanent puppy fold; the other one turned backwards with worry as he rolled light brown eyes at her. 

"Thank you," she made herself say as she straightened up. Her eyes prickled. "Are you going to lead me...? Do you even know what I'm asking you for, I can't even -- I can't even tell."

The first wolf, with the golden eyes, emerged from the bushes, stared at her, and then humphed like a grumpy old man; ambled forward and caught her sleeve and tugged.

It wasn't toward the town. Agatha had nowhere better to go. She went.

\--

The place where Kolya and Rerich had died was a mess. A ravine choked with brambles and snow, a whole side of the northern cliff crumbled into horse-sized boulders and thousands of pebbles and dirt, torn-apart trees that had been growing at the edge. It was bad enough, even a few days later, exposed roots and mud and everything else. But then the people come to dig them out had spilled everything all over the place all over again.

There was no way to figure out what had really happened anymore. Not from down there.

"Were there people... Hm." Agatha frowned to herself, a hand twisting absently in her damp skirts. The wolves -- seven of them so far, but only three in sight right now -- looked up at her, listening. She didn't know how much they understood but that was exactly why she must be extremely precise, and simple; they wouldn't make the right guess necessarily.

"Apart from Kolya and Rerich. Are there people scents that are just as old? The same day?"

People who would have heard. Or seen...?

... people who would have... It bothered her, that Rerich must have died first -- of a broken back, or asphyxiated, those took time and yet Kolya had not called, not piggybacked onto his secondary bonds with Great-Uncle Faustus' wolves, with the bitch wolf who had whelped Rerich and his littermates.

They _could_ have died at exactly the same time. A coincidence. Just as the cliff face falling down a full ten days after the big storm had weakened it. Coincidences, bad luck, those things _happened_. She just wanted to pretend there was a culprit so she could do something about it, but there was nothing to be done, dead was dead was dead.

Also there was no way Faustus hadn't checked already, while the grounds were fresher. If there had been a hint of foul play he'd have found it. What was she _thinking_ , waltzing in days late with wolves she couldn't even talk with when Faustus had had the _pack_ \--

The stocky one snorted, nudged at her hand with a thick, inelegant snout, sniffed pointedly. _Better nose,_ he sent, sharp and strong, wrapped in friendly disdain. Then he nipped at the black one and trotted off into the bushes. 

Oh. So that was how it felt. This -- this knowledge, not like a voice, more notions than words flavored with too many underlayers to grasp and decipher.

For a instant her nose prickled with a scent that was nothing like damp undergrowth and green things, that was strong and a bit sour and human. She shook her head and wiped her face with a vengeful sleeve and ran, skirts bunched up to her waist in her fists.

\--

It was past noon and she was officially late and she was still stalking the woods with her pack of ... sometimes three, sometimes ten, wolves dropping in and out to check on proceedings. The core three never changed, though.

They'd tracked back to Kolya and Rerich's arrival in the area, then back inside the muddled mess of villagers and investigating pack, and found very little. A tuft of bear fur, the faint smell of an old male, strange so low in the valley in this season. Maybe they'd startled each other. 

It was the only thing that even resembled an explanation other than bad luck and carelessness, so Agatha told the wolves to follow it.

If a bear had killed her brother. 

Then it hadn't meant to. It hadn't even eaten them. 

So she was going to get the pack and a spear and kill it _only_ if it was still in the valley. To protect her people.

And then she would skin its corpse and drape the fur over Kolya's tomb.

She almost tripped over the blond one when he stopped in the middle of the path. A little farther away the stocky one was moving in slow, persistent circles, nose to the ground; the black one growled quietly, the corner of his lip unveiling some more of his long fangs.

 _It's gone_ , the stocky wolf told her, staring straight at her with gold eyes that phosphoresced strangely in the shadow of the trees. 

It was gone. She looked up into the trees without thinking, like an adult bear was going to have spent the best part of five days perched on a branch without coming back down. 

"... Circle around. Spiral out until you find something. Go."

It took maybe ten minutes before the blond one was howling, a short, barkish call. 

Under a dense bush, on a rock, there was a tuft of bloody fur. 

Agatha knew nothing about furs of any sort. She knew, though. She knew.

Not bear.

 _Wolf_ , the stocky one confirmed, and his hackles went up in a slow wave along his back. 

_Not ours/known/pack?_

All three of them had their noses on it now, trying to draw an identification from a puff of several days old, snowmelt-washed undercoat. They weren't sure. Couldn't tell. Couldn't even tell the age, it might have been there three weeks in this protected little corner.

Well, there was one way to make sure. 

There had been a wolf here. (There had been wolves over every single square inch of the whole valley for centuries.) They just had to find them to ask.

 _Find_ , they all agreed. _Hunt down, **bring** down, then **ask**._

They ran.

\--

They burst out of the bushes and straight into water, a shallow brook, icy. On the other side was the field off the city walls where peddlers and traveling merchants camped -- horses and oxen hobbled to graze between the tents and caravans. A few of those shied away. They didn't care. They were busy. The best noses scanned the bank and the best eyes scanned their surroundings, in case the wolf was still waiting around, in case -- no matter. 

The water had killed all scent -- no wolf, no blood, nothing, just manure and campfires. Agatha screamed, short and deep, teeth bared.

"They'll have _left_ that camp! So we check the _exits_." What if the wolf had been a traveler, not Mechanicsburg blood and pack? Well then Agatha would have to _take a horse_. She might go home to pack first; what would she need? Clothes, food. A saddle. Kolya's personal horses hadn't been ridden in a week and they were used to the wolves; if she took two she could alternate when one of them got tired. 

"I'll _find_ them, if they think they can _escape_ \--"

She hadn't ridden in years. Who cared. She could --

There were people staring at her of course but none of them mattered, none of them had mattered until one of them flinched hard and then all three wolves were staring, were sharing his sudden nervous sweat, the thundering beat of his heart. Agatha tilted her head. 

All four of them moved together. 

The young man was on his posterior in the grass in the next second, smiled down at with four toothy maws.

Yells of protest echoed all around but he didn't join them, just stared at her like a deer before the descending pack, gorgeous eyes and mortal stupefaction. 

"You," she remembered to say with the right mouth. "Hello."

"Hello. My -- my lady?" He swallowed, and then of all things _smiled_. 

Agatha tilted her head. "What do you know."

"Um. You _are_ Lady Agatha -- aren't you?"

She blinked. "That -- what?" Her name. Oh. Right. He must have seen her when she got into town yesterday. There _had_ been people on the side of the road. Who cared. "Don't distract me. You got scared. _Why_?"

"Listen, young lady," some other man said from the crowd, "I don't _care_ who you are, you can't just--"

All three wolves rumbled out a growl. The young man on the ground yelped. "Hey! Hey, it's okay, it's fine, oh god don't eat Abner, he's nice, I'll talk to you, I'll--"

"Why didn't you talk to _uncle Faustus_ ," Agatha snarled without thought.

The young man looked up at her and he was maybe three years older than she was and his eyes were grey -- oddly fragile. Earnest. Open.

"Tell him what? I saw -- just. People coming out where you did. And he wasn't -- no one said Duke Heterodyne was looking for anyone! I... It would have looked bad. On me. Either I was trying to, to use his grief for my gain or I was an accomplice or I was just twisting the knife in the wound when they had nothing to do with _anything_ \--"

"He would have _listened_ ," Agatha snapped back.

"Would he have? My lady, we're _outsiders_. Duke Faustus isn't -- I mean. Not to speak badly of your uncle, but he's..."

"He only doesn't have his wolves eat our animals and chase us off because the townspeople want to see them!" someone else said from the now whispering crowd.

Right. Yes. That... That was actually fair. Agatha drew slightly back. People from outside the duchy were barely people to him and Grandfather; their only difference of mindset was that where Saturnus had been hostile Faustus was indifferent. 

She made herself breathe, then sank on her heels before the young man, a hand on blond fur for balance. 

"What did you see? In detail."

His face turned apologetic. "Not -- not much. Three people in rain cloaks, one wolf -- brown and gray, kind of _normal_ , and -- I was over there, and they were gone through the camp in seconds, I didn't really see their faces."

Normal. She turned over that word. Lots of Heterodyne wolves were strangely shaped, but not all of them. She wanted it to be a clue since nothing else was, but it wasn't enough.

"Nothing more? Are you sure?"

God, she could tell he was trying to remember, trying so hard, he looked at her all... Anguished, and sincere, and hurt. There was nothing to add. Her face fell.

"I'm so sorry, I -- oh. Oh, wait, maybe--" The wolves pressed their muzzles to him, bodies quivering; Agatha leaned in, grabbed his arms over the elbow, and he grabbed back, grinning, hopeful. "Old Spitty!"

"What?"

They struggled to their feet somehow and he was still holding her elbows back, still grinning. "Our llama! That's a beast from the Americas, he's vicious when you come near and one of them had a red cloak and there are red scraps in his radius--"

Agatha took off galloping, dragging him by the elbow. He went willing enough, tugged her to fix her trajectory as none of the wolves knew what the beast even smelled like.

There were red scraps. There was a tall beast with wool like a sheep and a neck and legs like a small giraffe kicking and spitting at her wolves, mad with offense. They had no time for this nonsense so the wolves drew it to the other end of its rope and she darted in to grab the cloth and they all retreated to sniff up a frenzy at it.

Strange herbivore scent, strong; discarded. Wet grass. Discarded. Human -- woman --

\--known.

Horse-lather took it up, threw the scent wide like a fisher's net in -- other minds, other wolves, humans, Mechanicsburgers. _What's the scent. Whose is it._

_Where is it._

It was a -- a tangle and a crowd and an endlessly branching road and it was too much for her mind and ached, buzzed like a migraine without the pain just yet, it bloomed through her like a crack of stone on a window, brutal and beautiful.

It was _in town_.

Here, someone said, strange and flat outside of her head, no depth of emotion-memory-otherthoughts. Here, I'll take you.

They were moving. It was in the right direction. They let it happen. Fourteen legs and two of them were off the ground, astride a snorting prey-beast's back and they growled because _hunt, now;_ warm weight at their back and the prey-beast jumped ahead. They followed, eager growls in their throats and teeth hungrily bared.

Someone _knew_. Someone knew and _hadn't told_. Someone knew what had happened to acrid-war-smoke and warren-gutted-open, someone knew why they'd been torn out the pack, lost forever; and _someone was going to tell or die_. 

Tell _and_ die, maybe. They were keeping their options open.

 _Who?_ someone, something faraway asked -- huge dark thundercloud of intent, a hundred minds all echoing the same nipping-at-cheeky-cub feeling. _Frenzy/hunt/kill? (Justify yourself, child.)_

They were so much _bigger_ than Agatha-horse-lather-panicked-sheep-sweaty-soldiers.

Who cared how many they were. _You'll join us or get out of our way,_ they snarled defiantly back _. (the smell on the red cloth the brotherkiller in the woods the wolf not of their pack) We will hunt **through** you if we have to._

The gate guards moved to slow them down but their own wolves pulled them back -- fell into step, paws and feet, guns and teeth -- she/they dragged them along on the hunt, forcing a path open through the crowd moving like rivers to the black cathedral to see the corpses, the empty things. There was a ringing noise crashing overhead -- (lying in state, service on the parvis) and yelling outsiders, and from the pack, nothing but hungry stares as they flew through.

The thundercloud presence drew back, pleased. _(Ooh, show us your teeth, cubling, show us how you hunt.)_

The scent burst thick and hot under one of their farther-away noses, the prey was sighted by two, seven, twenty pairs of eyes.

The pony broke past the last circle, came to a sliding stop on long black marble steps; Agatha tumbled off its back with the young man, dress torn and muddy, bare-footed, hair a frightful tangle. 

Every single wolf in attendance was growling, the light, eager note of anticipated violence. 

Agatha came to a stop over the open coffin. Her brother, cheeks powdered a healthy pink, skull still dented, her brother's brother, brushed shiny-smooth. Klaus Barry Rerichsbrother and Rerich Kolyasbrother Heterodyne, lying together.

The abbess was chalky-white under her wimple.

On the other side of the parvis there stood Faustus and his ancient wolf and behind him the seneschal and his son and grandson and the cook and the castle servants; Punch and Judy, staring at her in a horror she didn't have time to worry about.

"Why are the wolves growling," the abbess asked Faustus, who smiled. 

"Why, I haven't the faintest, my dear! Why do _you_ think they're growling?"

Panic all over her smell, panic and rage, and then she lunged at Agatha over the coffin, pulling something bright out of her habit.

 _Oh,_ Agatha thought, and smiled. _I was so sure grief had made me crazy._

There was an arm around her neck, tight and choking, there was something sharp digging into her collarbone -- the smell of hot coppery blood burst into her/their noses. Oh. Oh!

_Oh, she had **dared**._

Excellent.

Agatha swept her arm brutally up -- more blood, barely any pain, shared between four/a hundred/three thousand bodies. She shoved her whole weight backwards into the woman holding her, the woman who had known what had happened to Kolya and Rerich -- who'd for all she knew _caused_ what had happened to Kolya and Rerich, and then come shameless to preside over their last rites.

They were grappling beside the coffin now, shoved slightly sideways on its trestles and the other woman was bigger but Agatha was all over rage.

"Call them back!" she was still shouting to Faustus. "Call them back -- I'll kill the girl!"

Judy was yelling. Agatha didn't want her in danger; she didn't let the wolves let her or Punch through.

"Oh no, my dear," Faustus said, sounding pleased as anything, "I don't think you will."

Agatha kicked with both feet into her belly, shoved her off -- the abbess tumbled down the steps and then Agatha was on her again -- the knife was in her hand and three maws were on the abbess' legs and arm and then Agatha had the knife under _her_ throat for a change and was leaning in, all the _town_ was leaning in, breath hot in anticipation.

"Tell me how you killed them," she said with a quake at the back of her voice, an avalanche. "Tell me why they died, tell me who did it, tell me everything, _and then I'll let you die_."

Snarling back, the abbess plunged a hand down a tear in her habit, pulled out -- something long, shiny. A tube --

Pistol -- if Agatha shoved the gun away wrong then someone in the crowd would be hit --

The stocky wolf's maw snapped closed on her whole neck with the finality of a bear trap.

Blood and meat -- the body shaking and kicking under Agatha -- she yanked the pistol out of that hand and was bucked off and stood. She took a step back as other wolves took their bite, _it **killed pack**_ spreading like ink in water through town.

Crunching bones. The feel-taste of meat parting under her fangs, of hot arterial blood pumping out over her tongue, of vertebrae cracking in her mouth. Biting elsewhere, biting _more_ , tearing. She was an island upon which a sea of wolves broke and reformed, each eager to take their pound of flesh. She was...

She'd killed someone. The golden-eyed wolf had bit down, but she had made the choice. She wasn't...

She was seventeen and a university student (not anymore), a duke's heir in torn-up rags and her brother was dead and she'd killed someone. Huh.

"Agatha!" Judy screamed, and pulled her close, and was almost bitten. (had gotten nipped good and proper when she pushed her way in, but didn't seem to care.) "Agatha -- oh god, are you okay?!"

She let Judy and Punch drag her back to Great-Uncle Faustus' side, an island of amused contemplation in that frenzied sea. She let them pat her up and down, press a cloth to her bleeding neck, tally her scratches and her bruises. She didn't look at them. She looked at Faustus.

 _Magnificent_ , he shared without words, mouth stretched into a too-wide smile. 

"She had accomplices and a _reason_ and now we'll never know," Agatha said back, too exhausted, too empty to be bitter.

Faustus shrugged. Behind them the crowd was yelling fit to blot out the ringing bell -- and two thirds of them were locals, were pack; those weren't yelling in shock and terror.

"There will always be a reason for someone to kill you, Heterodyne. You'll be a duchess. You'll reign. You'll have the pack. There will always be this or that reason for imbeciles to take offense."

His face twisted into a sneer.

"Who cares? They're your enemies. _Eat them_."

She stared back at him for an endless moment. Wolf-ghost, wolf-mad, insular and inhuman. Wild. Free.

Her three wolves caught up, pressed against her sides. _The sweaty scent of tired soldiers in their barracks after battle_ licked his bloody chops clean, staring straight into old Zog's eyes. _Horse-lather_ tossed his head up, gave Punch a suspicious look where the man was still leaning over his back to hold cloth to Agatha's knife wound. _Sheep being bothered into a panic_ wagged his tail, nosed at her elbow.

 _Man-and-pony are all panic-squeezed/shoved by the crowd_ , he shared. _Find/bring?_

She ran a hand through his shaggy fur. "Yes," she said slowly. "Do that. We shouldn't get them crushed to death for having helped us."

Blond and black wolves arrowed away together; the stocky one stayed. 

None of them felt _gone_. None of them would ever feel gone, not until they died.

When she turned around the frenzy of wolves had settled and they had spread out onto the parvis, them and their human partners, and they all stared straight at her, expectant. There was a wash of red gore on the black stone but the coffin was still on its trestles, so who cared. 

_No time like the present to start learning. Your orders, child?_

She didn't know if she should have the outsiders escorted out of the city walls. They'd seen too much already...

 _No one will believe them, though_ , came synthesized from a dozen voices, a hundred opinions. There were always such ridiculous rumors about Mechanicsburg. What would they say? That a crazed teenage girl had brought the pack to devour someone alive right on top of the late Duke Klaus' mortal remains? It would be barely a nudge to spin this out as the wolves devouring the corpses to bring their brothers back into the fold, like some kind of pagan cannibals. Why not a heat orgy right in the cathedral? Why not a rabies-induced massacre? No, my cousin's aunt's neighbor was there and she says they served up live babies in escargot sauce for the beasts...

Agatha's lips curved into a tiny, reluctant smile. Heh. Alright, then.

 _Clear the remains off the parvis_ , she told the wolves. _Carry them to the side. We'll deal with them later._ Then she stepped forward, a slight nudge of intent bringing her great-uncle along, elbow to wiry, gnarled elbow.

"Pallbearers?" She looked around until she found them, the seneschal's son and grandson, the master of horses, three other men she couldn't place. They'd loved her brothers, though. It was enough for her. 

Her bare feet were frozen insensate on paved stones. She almost didn't notice when she stepped in the blood, and then she noticed and decided she didn't care what it looked like. It was time to finish taking care of what was important to them, not of what outsiders would think about it.

"Let's bring them home," she said out loud. And she started the long walk back to her castle.


End file.
